1. Field
The present disclosure relates to optical communication equipment and, more specifically but not exclusively, to routing optical signals in an optical network.
2. Description of the Related Art
This section introduces aspects that may help facilitate a better understanding of the disclosure. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is in the prior art or what is not in the prior art.
The physical layer of an optical network typically suffers from various linear and nonlinear impairments, such as power loss, dispersion, crosstalk, cross-phase modulation, four-wave mixing, etc. The adverse effects of these impairments are especially pronounced in optically transparent and optically translucent networks that are typically configured to keep the communication signal in the optical domain as long as possible and/or employ optical-to-electrical-to-optical signal regeneration very sparsely. However, signal-routing methods that are directed at improving the network efficiency by taking into account the physical-layer impairments are not sufficiently developed yet.